White hat organic search engine optimisation is a very time intensive practice. By starting with analysis a seasoned SEO proffessional will then be able to identify areas of your website that would benefit from improvement. Avoid using companies that utilise black hat techniques, whilst they may deliver short term results the long term is not so rosy, search engines are constantly updated, and when they catch you using black hat seo techniques you will be invariably punished, this means you could go from 1000 hits per day to virtually none.
There are many areas that need to be looked at when optimising a web site, firstly the meta tags, many people believe that SEO involves nothing more than the simple process of stuffing the meta tags full of hundreds of keywords, nothing could be further from the truth. Whislt the meta tags should contain important keywords, the meta tag optimisation process is alot more complexed that straightforwardly putting the keywords in the tags, they need to be carefully formatted to give optimal prominence of your keywords whilst at the same time ensuring that the density of the keywords in within ideal proportions.
Header tags are also very useful for optimisation since major search enignes see them as a good indication of what the page is about. this applies not only to to < H1 > tags but also to a lesser degree to all header tags. Selection of keywords is also a critical factor, you should ensure that all your keywords have high relevence to your sites content and at the same time are keywords that carry first-rate levels of traffic and are not too competetive for you to be able to acheive good rankings for. Many people these days opt for flash websites because it is visually stunning, whilst I myself love the visual aspect of flash based websites, you should never construct a website wholly from flash. This is for one reason, search engines cannot read flash! So you may aswell just have an empty domain, Flash is best used in moderation mixed with html, if you write your textual content in html and then leave the image showcases to flash you can create sites that are both visually dazzling and search engine freindly. A simular thing applies to javascript, alot of content management systems use javascript, and this type of site is becoming more and more popular by the day, but there are some cms scripts that use javascript for everything including the body content of every page, the end result with regards to search engine optimisation is catastrophic, you could have hundreds of pages of top quality content and the search engines cannot see any of it!
If you are thinking of using a cms to build a site I would advise you take a look at a site that is already using this script and use an seo tool bar on your browser to view the source code, if you cannot see the body content in the source code ditch the idea of using this script and move on to check out a different cms, there are many that are search engine friendly and it shouldnt take you too long to find something to suit your requirements, Wordpress for one is great seo wise and it can also create sites that pass w3c standards validation as an added bonus, this is great for ensuring your site will appear as you intended it to across multiple platforms including mobile devices.
great info @samdenton.
wordpress is frickin awesome!
W3C validation is somthing that more people should be aware of, valid code is a sign of good work, upvoted.
I use wordpress for my business site, I love it.
good tips, you are obviously pretty clued up on the subject.
I use !joomla and wordpress too, but i prefer wordpress as it's more intuative.
You got a 16.67% upvote from @upyou thanks to @nickdavison!